Two factions of the American left that ought to be allies remain estranged. In their new report entitled The Left’s Coalition Crisis, Joan C. Williams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, and Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working Class Politics, argue that a “massive divide” between working-class people and college-educated liberals is undermining the majority the Left needs to govern. And it’s playing out now across the country: as liberals double down on an obsession with defending democracy, Democratic candidates more attuned to the needs of working Americans are winning on a platform centered on day-to-day tangibles like rent, wages, and safety.

Williams and Abbott’s report, which can be real in full here, dissects the results of a poll the authors conducted earlier this year and lays out the contrasting political priorities of respondents based on their backgrounds. From there, they offer insight into how the language and moral posturing (“Do the Work,” “Check Your Privilege”) of the middle class repeatedly fails to strike a chord with working-class perspectives. One of their findings is that college-educated liberals lack what the authors call “class competence”: the ability to speak persuasively to working-class values. And with the class divide as sharp as it is today, it’s not a skill that can be faked. Williams and Abbott’s prescription is more practical: listen to what working-class people say they want, drop the moralizing vocabulary, and cede real influence over the progressive agenda to working people.